The real Crocodile Dundee lay dead on an Australian outback road yesterday after a police bullet ended a rampage which turned a celluloid legend into a murderer.

Rod Ansell shot dead a police officer and was killed in return fire after injuring two men in a two-day shooting spree that gave a gruesome twist to his reputation as the wild man of the bush.

Years of bitterness and anger over his crumbling livelihood exploded into violence when Ansell, 44, barefoot as usual, emerged from scrubland in the Northern Territory with a shotgun and rifle. Without warning he fired at two police officers at a roadblock, killing Sergeant Glen Huitson, 38, a father of two. Ansell died when Constable Jim O'Brien returned fire.

Detectives were last night trying to piece together the motives of the man whose tales of outback survival inspired the 1986 Hollywood blockbuster starring Paul Hogan.

Voted Territorian of the Year, feted as a glorious anachronism who made a lone stand against soulless urbanisation, Ansell catapulted to stardom after a crocodile overturned his canoe on a remote river west of Darwin, tipping the then 21-year-old into a two-month survival adventure of drinking cow's blood, eating wallabies and chasing bees for honey until he was discovered by wandering aborigines.

A newspaper ran the story and fame followed, fuelled by a book, To Fight the Wild.

Blond, blue-eyed and laconic, he even looked like Paul Hogan, but over the past eight years his life started falling apart. Ansell could easily have evaded the road block on the lonely Stuart Highway, but he chose to kill.

The previous night, a gunman believed to be Ansell had opened fire in a house in Livingstone, 35 miles south of Darwin, which was occupied by a woman, a 10-year-old girl and a man who had an index finger shot off after retaliating with a baseball bat.

The three fled and were saved when a neighbour drove his truck between them and the gunman. The neighbour's face was cut when bullets shattered his windscreen.

The gunman escaped into the darkness, triggering a police search that ended at the roadblock some 12 hours later.

Rachel Percy, co-author of Fight the Wild, said: "He could put up with a lot, he could cope with a lot. But he said there was no point in arguing about things; he would rather stand up and have a fight about them."

Ms Percy said Ansell felt cheated at not earning a penny from Crocodile Dundee and its sequel. The films earned hundreds of millions of pounds at the box office. The film makers also banned him from plugging his cattle station in Arnhem Land as belonging to the real Crocodile Dundee. Despite regular appearances on talk shows his business started collapsing in the early 1990s. He blamed the Northern Territory government for not compensating him properly during a disease eradication programme that slaughtered 3,000 of his cattle.

In 1992 Ansell was convicted without sentence of rustling 30 cattle valued at £2,800. An assault on a farmer produced a £200 fine.